Born at Plymouth and after studying medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, went to Edinburgh where he graduated MD in 1812. He immediately abandoned this profession, however, in order to take up natural history and in 1813 he was appointed Assistant Librarian , and had risen by 1821 to be Keeper of the Natural History Department in the British Museum. Here he studied molluscs in particular, many of his publications being on this subject, but he also worked on the bird and entomology collections which he re-arranged according to the ‘natural’ system of Cuvier and Latreille. William Stearn, The Natural History Museum at South Kensington (1981), has described Leach as ‘a brilliant and lively young man... who made natural history excursions even to the Orkney Islands and visited Cuvier in Paris... Young John Edward Gray visiting the Museum at the age of sixteen found Leach a stimulating, inspiring companion and Leach took to him’. But there was also another side to Leach for which he became infamous ‘He despised the taxidermy of Sir Hans Sloane’s age and made periodical bonfires of Sloanian specimens’. Unfortunately his work at the Museum injured his health and in 1821 (the year in which he brought George Samouelle into the Museum) he was obliged to retire. The last few years of his life were spent with his sister in Italy where he died of cholera at the Palazzo St. Sebastiano near Tortona. The Coleoptera were said to be Leach’s favourite insect group and this is supported by the numerous references to him in Stephens (1828 -) who described him as ‘my highly valued friend’. Leach is recorded to have made the first British capture of Carabus intricatus ‘under a stone in a wood opposite the virtuous Lady Mine on the river Tavy below Tavistock in Devonshire’. His best known publications were in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles and The Zoological Miscellany which appeared in 3 volumes in 1814, 1815 and 1817, including many descriptions of new genera and species of Coleoptera. (particularly: in the water beetles: Laccophilus, Hydaticus, Acilius, Cercyon, Hydrobius; the Histeridae: Abraeus, Dendrophilus, Onthophilus; the Silphidae: Necrodes, Thanatophilus, Oiceoptama, Phosphuga; the Pselaphidae: Tychus, Bythinus, (Rybaxis) longicornis, Bryaxis curtisii, (Reichenbachia) juncorum) and the Scarabeidae: Typhaeus. Other papers on beetles were ‘An account of two species of Clytra’ (Trans.ESL. 1809, pp.248-249); two papers on Meloe in Trans.LSL., 1815, pp.35-43 and 242-25, with several hand-coloured plates (in the first of these he refers to ‘having in my cabinet all the British species hitherto discovered’); ‘Characters of a new genus of Coleopterous insects of the family Byrrhidae [Murmidius ferrugineus]’ (Trans.LSL., 13(1), 1822, p.41); ‘On the stirpes and genera composing the family Pselaphidae; with descriptions of some new species [includes Tychus, Bythinus, Rybaxis longicornis and Reichenbachia juncorum]’ Zool.J.Lond., 2, 1825, pp.445-453; and ‘On the characters of Abbotia, a new genus belonging to the family Histeridae, with descriptions of two species’ (Trans. Plymouth Inst. 8, 19830, pp.155-157. Leach purchased part of Francillon’s collection in June 1818. FRS 1817, FLS and a member of numerous foreign societies. There is an entry in DNB with list of sources, and further sources are listed by Gilbert (1977). (MD 11/03)
Dates
1790 – 25 August 1836